Did win £500 about 6 +years ago.
But about 3 months ago did have one £50 and three £25.
Last month had a £25
Good year so far.
Much better than any fixed rate Bonds
As you state A POUND invested will return thoes odds
With the odds you gave if some one owns £30k they have a chance of winning at least £25 per month…over the year they can/will win £300
Do that every month they will get the same return if invested in a Bank Bond.
Plus tax free
Errrrrr nope.
Probabilities and distributions do not work like that.
To explain. . .
Take an ordinary 6-sided die
You have a 1 in 6 chance of rolling a 6
But this DOES NOT mean that if you have 6 rolls, you actually will roll a 6.
Nor does it mean the die is rigged or loaded if you don’t roll a 6.
It may take many more than 6 rolls to actually roll a 6
So your notion that someone putting £30,000 into PBs is actually going to win £25 every month is I’m afraid, wishful thinking, delusion.
They will be lucky to win a fraction of 1% profit in the year.
Meanwhile their money could earn 2.5% pa interest on a 5yr fixed bond, or 2% in a cash ISA with no risk at all.
You could earn masses more investing in good stocks and shares.
But that was the odds you quoted.
You stated that to win £25 the odds were 30K to 1.
So if I have £30k in bonds the odds YOU QUOTED state I will win £25 every month.
Sigh
So you ignored my previous post completely then !
The mathematical odds, which govern the total number of possible outcomes are theoretical and dependent on various factors. The ACTUAL results seen will vary tremendously depending on various factors and the number of times you roll the die or run the PB numbers.
You need to get you head around that to talk sensibly about odds, probabilities and results.
The odds of a flipped coin coming up Heads is of course 1 in 2. By your uninformed view then you would expect that every 2 times you flipped it you would see at least one head.
This is of course completely wrong, a school boy fallacy.
You could flip the coin 8 times and it come up tails each time.
Would that indicate that the coin is rigged?
No absolutely not. It’s possible it is rigged but it may not be.
How would we determine if it was rigged?
You would have to flip the coin a great many times to see the results, the heads and tails distribution.
You have to run probability scenarios MANY TIMES in order for the known theoretical ODDS to become evident.
So NO, emphatically NO, if you roll a die just 6 times you most certainly are unlikely to see each number 1,2,3,4,5,6 come up once. To expect that is to be ignorant of probability and sample sizes.
Similarly, a 1 in 30,000 chance of winning £25 on the PBs DOES NOT mean that you WILL win £25 each time if you have 30,000 chances.
You have to run the scenario (in this case ERNIE picking numbers) many many times before the reality and results come anywhere near the theoretical odds of 1 in 30,000.
Some people will win more £25 prizes than others but over a very long period it should even out. The problem is the length of that “long period”, i.e. the sample size.
Imagine the old National Lottery. You had 1 in 14m chance of winning the lottery. Those odds are staggeringly poor but worse still they wouldn’t PRACTICALLY match the seen results without a super colossal sample size. Bear in mind that the average person might live to say 100 yrs old. In their lifetime they will only participate in 5200 lottery draws (being one per week for 52 weeks times 100 years).
Even if they could somehow survive to participate in 14m draws, they still couldn’t expect to win that jackpot because distribution just doesn’t work like that. Just as 6 rolls of a die are unlikely to turn up the numbers 1,2,3,4,5 and 6, so too 14m lottery draws are not likely to turn up each of the 14m possible combinations once each.
So going back to PBs.
Your odds of winning £25 are 1 in 30,000. That is the known mathematical theory, the true odds. But you can’t expect to see those odds actually played out in results until a super massive number of PB draws have been conducted.
If one wanted to check that the National Lottery draw was fair and honest you would have to run an absolutely enormous sample of actual draws, by which I mean many many millions of draws. That just isn’t going to happen in anyone’s lifetime and thus it can’t actually be tested to see if it is rigged. For that reason and other fairly obvious conspiratorial reasons I wouldn’t touch the Lottery with a barge pole.
Equally I wouldn’t touch Premium Bonds. They exist to take money from dim people who don’t understand odds and probabilities. That money is used to invest wisely in good things which generates tons of profit for the operators and gives bugger all of it back to the mug punters.
It truly is a mugs game same as all online gambling.
You’re so ‘Money Supermarket’ Realist……
I will gratefully accept the £25 I’ve won this month 
Nice Christmas Present…but am gutted I drew a blank this month but cant complain have had a good return this year.
Maybe you’ll be lucky for the New Year, Galty 
premium bonds win
just checked for December and won 2 x £25 prizes.
That’s not bad.
Better than a poke in the eye isn’t it. 
Well done! I am pleased for you:-)
Yippee 5x 25 probaby the most I have ever won !
That’s brilliant Muddy and Realspeed, that would be more than the interest you would have received in a savings account…
Errrr I seriously doubt that.
Ask them, how much money have they had deposited in PBs and over what period and what their total winnings have been.
The result will put the profits into a fraction of 1%
Ok you suggest that my money in PB is gambling
Shock horror.
So wear do you suggest I put that money?
Yep, literally throwing money away that should rightly be yours
This depends on whether you are prepared to put some work and effort into growing your wealth or whether you just want to sit on your arse and expect others to pay you free money.
If the latter, you can expect to get nothing but a tiny pittance of “free money”.
Still many choose that option.
First I will make what should be an obvious point. Your No 1 priority is ALWAYS to pay your debts off first. Anyone who is sat there with a mortgage but who has £000s sitting in PBs is frankly a complete and utter retard. The amount of interest you could save by putting any and all amounts of spare cash into mortgage payments is staggering. It’s how I paid off my mortgage very early, in my 40s.
Same goes for any other debts, esp credit cards.
Always pay those debts off as quickly as possible.
Now, assuming you are debt free your choices can include the following:
If you are prepared to put your money into a savings account and leave it there for 5 years then you can earn over 2% interest.
Examples:
Secure Trust Bank - 5 Year Fixed Rate - 2.51% AER
Paragon Bank - 5 year Fixed Rate - 2.5% AER
Atom Bank - 5 Year Fixed Rate - 2.45%
You can earn 2% interest per year in 2 Year Fixed Rate accounts.
All of these will far outperform your PBs imo.
However if you are prepared to get financially savvy and stop being ripped off by the financial sector and effectively “do what they do”, i.e. invest your money and track those investments then you can learn about stocks and shares and related matters.
You can open a share trading account with any number of companies in seconds. Then you can buy and sell shares at your whim. You can buy shares in companies that you think will do well or which you think are in an industry sector that is heading for upside. For example, at the moment the price of oil is rising again after a long period of being in the doldrums, so oil producing companies will have increased profits and will do well.
You can invest in low risk steady companies or high risk tiddlers like you find on the AIM market (the Wild West of the investment world!).
The AIM market is riddled with unscrupulous traders and there are forums out there presented as chat spaces where people discuss individual shares, but which are used as platforms for gangs and groups of large investors to heavily promote (ramp) shares they are invested in. You have to learn how they post, the language they use, their typical methods, in order to be able to become immune to the ramping nonsense. They say things like “this share will be 5p by Friday” and so on. They create a false picture of loads of people being positive about a share, (usually its the same people with multiple forum accounts) and this does sucker lots of naïve people to invest.
Once you learn how this works, how traders talk and behave and how some company CEO’s behave, then you can spot opportunities to invest.
Earlier this year I bought £3000 of shares in an energy company at about 1p per share. There was a massive rise and the share price went up to 7p. That’s a 6-fold increase in my investment. My £3000 of shares were suddenly worth £21,000.
You won’t get that kind of return from sitting on your arse and giving your money away to Lottery and Premium Bond operators !!
I was lucky. Some other shares I bought performed dismally. There are no guarantees. Crucially though, YOU are in control of your money, no-one else.
You can do all of this with a pension too. I moved a company pension into a private SIPP so I could trade my pension pot in the stocks and shares I choose.
Everything in this world has to be worked for and earned.
Your finances are no exception. We are conditioned/brainwashed from young life and deliberately not taught how finance works. Hence most of us are hand-held and walked into debts for cars, mortgages for houses, credit cards and bank loans which we then spend years paying back.
There’s a reason they don’t teach you how the financial world works. It’s to keep you dependent, keep you paying more than you should and to keep you a slave.
Freedom comes from getting savvy.
The thing is Realist five years is too long .
Heck we might have shuffled off this mortal coil in five years might as well have the thrill of possibly winning the million !
Well done though on your canny investment .
Yes sometimes shares do well and others go the other way.
It’s a risk .
I totally agree that we are not educated in finance .
It should be IMO taught at school .
It’s a fool’s hope.
The odds are 1 in 34,324,121,998
34 BILLION !
If people were allocated one grain of sand on a beach and each month an adjudicator came and randomly selected one grain from the beach and gave the owner £1m, that’s how remote the chances are.
If the adjudicator insisted that people were present at the beach for each draw, he would soon find that no-one bothered to turn up because the odds are so staggeringly ridiculous.
Even if naïve people can’t get their heads around the odds there is the moral issue. In order for anyone to win £1m, thousands and thousand of other people have to lose their money (the money they should have made by investing their hard-earned properly).
It’s the same with the National Lottery. You can only win of millions of other people all lose their money.
OK how do you anwser this ITs 34B to win a miilion and every month and 2 people win a million every month
PS sunshine the bit you don’t get is with PB YOU DONT LOSE YOUR money you can take OUT the same amount you invested in at any time.
You are a moron